Deploy Wagtail CMS to PythonAnywhere

Starting a deployment

First git add the file changes made so far and git commit them.

For the moment I'm working directly on my main branch. In the future I'll be working on other branches and merging them to main for running a deployment.

You should push to the origin repo first e.g:

git push origin main
bash
note code Copy code

Add the new remote to your local repository

Substitute account-name with your own account name. My account is in the EU so I need to use ssh.eu.pythonanywhere.com

On your local machine in the root of the project run:

git remote add production account-name@ssh.eu.pythonanywhere.com:/home/account-name/bare-repos/www.domain.com.git
bash
note code Copy code

I'm using production as the name of the remote repo. You can use any name you like.

Pushing to the remote repo (will start a deployment)

I'm going to push my main branch to the remote repo.

git push production main
bash
note code Copy code

Earlier on, in the post-receive hook I added a check to ensure only the main branch can be deployed. If you are on another branch and accidentally try to push it to your production remote it will not complete and report the error.

  • I can see the push has worked because in /var/www/sites/www.domain.com I can see the new files.
  • The post-receive hook will manage the creation of the webapp directory if it doesn't exist and will copy across the current file changes to /var/www/sites/wwww.domain.com
  • If all is well you should see the deployment steps displayed in your console.
  • On the first deployment it can take a few minutes to complete. Subsequent deployments usually take less time.
  • In the post-receive hook, the touch command on the WSGI file will reload the webapp, it can take a minute or so to actually run on PythonAnywhere.

If you now visit your webapp url it should be live.

Create a superuser on PythonAnywhere (optional and only required one time)

Open the Web tab on PythonAnywhere.

Under the Virtualenv section click Start a console in this virtualenv to open a new console in the sites virtual env. (Your environment variables are loaded automatically for you because the virtual env will be activated)

And run:

./manage.py createsuperuser
bash
note code Copy code

If you now visit webapp and login at /admin you should be able to test out the default Wagtail CMS